The links between neoliberal ideology, populism and nationalism have long fascinated critical scholars. Stuart Hall’s Gramsci-inspired ‘great moving right show’ focussed on Thatcher’s state-instituted free-market doctrine, legitimated around ‘a veneer of active popular consent’ (see Huff and Van Sant, 2018). Some three decades later, with neoliberalism under pressure from globally interconnected economic, political, and environmental crises, the rightward ‘show’ is in full swing. An emerging body of work suggests ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ has arrived in Brazil – home to the world’s largest rainforest, mining and agri-business enterprises, and some of its biggest and most unequal cities (c.f. Bruff and Tansel, 2019; Saad-Filho, 2018).

Building on previous work exploring how leftist governments combined developmentalism with neoliberal elements (c.f Morais and Saad-Filho, 2011), Saad-Filho (2018) argues the election of new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is characterised by the attempt to deepen unpopular neoliberal reforms. Unlike Brazil’s mainstream right, Bolsonaro combines neoliberal objectives with strongman leadership and a radical conservative and nationalistic discourse explicitly centred on attacks against internal and external “others”. For Huff and Van Sant (2018), the ‘rhetorical and superficial condemnation of “elite politics”, “corporate power” and “business as usual”’, by political actors like Bolsonaro, ‘often masks the deepening entrenchment of extractive capitalism, environmental colonialism, and the militarization of everyday life’. Increasing precarity and discontent alongside a decline in collective bargaining has been “highjacked” by the far right (Saad-Filho, 2018), helped along by social media manipulation with scant regard for the truth of social injustice and ecological degradation. With a history of military rule in Brazil, instability is also accompanied by anti-democratic elements in government as well as violent rhetoric, potentially prefiguring heightened state violence against both social movements and criminals (or those wrongly accused of being so).

These questions also have socio-spatial dimensions, linked to processes of development and political action in diverse urban and rural settings. Notwithstanding significant improvements in service provision and legal and regulatory frameworks associated with the City Statute, Brazil’s cities remain highly unequal, precarious and insecure (Maricato, 2017). While the far right draws much of its electoral support from middle and upper classes concentrated in urban areas and resentful of redistributive reforms, Bolsonaro also tapped into widespread working-class discontent about issues like crime (Richmond, 2018) and slow progress in addressing elite privilege in areas like pensions and tax (Garmany and Pereira, 2019). From autonomist-inspired urban social movements, to anti-corruption protests, to urban occupations by groups like the MTST, cities also remain key sites for street mobilisations by both left- and right-wing groups.

Brazil’s status as one of the world’s most urbanised countries is of course contrasted by radical rural change and internal migration. ‘Agro-neoliberalism’ (Ioris, 2018) and mineral extractivism (c.f. Raftopoulos and Poweska, 2017) expanded under all recent governments, with concessions granted to powerful ruralistas intent on removing environmental regulation. Bolsonaro’s authoritarian disregard for Indigenous rights accompanies his plans for Amazon roadbuilding, mining in indigenous territories, agribusiness expansion in the Amazon and Cerrado, and further dam building in the mould of Belo Monte, in a country with a terrible record on dam maintenance as the Brumadinho and Mariana disasters attest. All of this adds to a sense of a global (if non-uniform) market push for extractive and consumption-based growth at the expense of socio-spatial equality and biodiversity. However, such encroachments provoke resistance from peasant, indigenous and quilombola movements, as well as calls for the Brazilian left to rethink developmentalism in favour of radical rural and urban democratisation (Acosta and Gudynas, 2018; Scoones et al., 2017).

This session interrogates the notion of authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil from a geographical perspective. We welcome wide-ranging papers shedding light on:

– the conditions that gave rise to Brazil’s current political, economic and ecological conjuncture

Raftopoulos, M., & Powęska, R. (Eds.). (2017). Natural resource development and human rights in Latin America: state and non-state actors in the promotion of and opposition to extractivism. London: Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Shifts in the social and institutional conditions of the urban peripheries of Brazil’s major cities have altered political subjectivities and weakened affinities with the once-dominant Workers’ Party of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. With a “revolt of the peripheries” brewing, Bolsonaro was able exploit his comparative rhetorical advantage and win the presidency despite making few real commitments to address the economic plight of these areas. This blog post is available on the blog of the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre

]]>https://mattyrichy.wordpress.com/2018/12/17/revolt-of-the-peripheries-in-brazil-why-low-income-voters-in-wealthy-regions-swung-from-the-pt-to-bolsonaro/feed/0bolsonaro_car_painting_flag_670x335mattyrichyReflections on the darkest day of a 15-year love affair with Brazilhttps://mattyrichy.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/reflections-on-the-darkest-day-of-a-15-year-love-affair-with-brazil/
https://mattyrichy.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/reflections-on-the-darkest-day-of-a-15-year-love-affair-with-brazil/#respondMon, 29 Oct 2018 16:59:48 +0000http://mattyrichy.wordpress.com/?p=836

This is Brazil’s darkest day since I first came to country as a 19 year old, over fifteen years ago. Ever since then I’ve held a special fondness and fascination for this immense, beautiful, complex country. I’m heartbroken to see it elect a man who I believe represents a huge backwards step for Brazilian society and an existential threat to the country’s young democracy. This is an attempt to understand why this has happened.

2003: “Agora é Lula!”

I first arrived on 2 January 2003, the second day of what would be 13 years of government by the Workers’ Party, and spent two months travelling across much of the Northeast, Southeast and Southern regions of the country.

I remember at the time I was struck by the scale of poverty and inequality I witnessed. I vividly remember seeing barefoot black children juggling at traffic lights for change in Rio de Janeiro (a far rarer sight today), of dirt roads lined by wooden shacks in the interior of Bahia.

I also saw immense wealth and privilege. I stayed in the houses of well-off people who had live-in maids. Women who lived in tiny rooms, made the breakfast, washed the dishes, did the laundry. They did things that I had grown up believing adults should do themselves.

I knew little about Brazilian politics, but there seemed to be a spirit of hope in the air. Everywhere I went I saw billboards that read “Agora é Lula!” People complained that things didn’t work, about violence and poverty. But many I spoke to also thought things might improve.

And for the next ten years, for lots of people, they did. I would meet her only years later, but in 2005 my wife became the first person in her family to go to university. She was able to thanks to a PROUNI scholarship grant, a programme the PT introduced that year. In Brazil, kids like her weren’t supposed to go to university. She’s the woman I know and love today in part because she had that opportunity. And there are millions of others like her.

2013-2016: “Escolas e hospitais padrão FIFA” to “Fora PT!”

Ten years after my first visit, in late 2012, I went to live in Rio de Janeiro. (I had visited a couple of times in the intervening period and perceived notable changes). When I arrived the country was under the third term of PT government, and was internationally regarded as a hugely successful experiment in poverty-reduction and democratic consolidation.

When I arrived I expected to hear this view echoed by people I met. However, to my surprise, almost everyone was complaining. Something was going on, but it wasn’t yet clear to me what it was.

From what I could tell, rich people were mainly complaining about the perceived corruption and incompetence of politicians and public administrators. In the favelas, where I conducted research, people were complaining about insecurity and poor services. Everyone was complaining about traffic.

I began to understand that these embodied three different kinds of problems. The first – political corruption – had always existed in Brazil, but was being used, selectively and opportunistically, by the upper middle classes to attack the government.

The second kind of problem – failures to provide adequate healthcare, education and security – were very real. During the PT era there had been improvements, at least in the first two of these areas, but they did not meet people’s expectations. As the rich sought these services privately, the problems overwhelmingly affected the poor.

The third kind of problem – issues like congestion on the roads and environmental degradation – was a mixture of the first two. They had genuinely become worse under the PT, but, in a way, this was a product of the government’s success. With higher incomes, more people were able to consume. But the public infrastructure needed to metabolise that consumption had not kept up. As these were unavoidably collective goods, the rich couldn’t entirely opt out. Everyone felt the effects.

Despite the fundamental differences between them, the three kinds of problem seemed to be rolled up with one another in the way people expressed their growing dissatisfaction. There seemed to be agreement that some kind of change was needed. The question was, what kind of change and for whose benefit?

In June 2013, I was in Rio when protests exploded onto the streets. It was exhilarating. On 17 June I was sure we were seeing a popular leftist movement demanding better public services and a deepening of inequality reduction. At a larger demonstration three days later, I was no longer sure. Some banners called for “FIFA-quality schools and hospitals” while others for an end to corruption and lower taxes. In the cacophony of voices, the demands seemed vague and contradictory.

Three years and a re-election later, in 2016 – by which time I was living in São Paulo – it was clear that the spirit of 2013 had been fully captured by an elitist, anti-government agenda. In the context of highly politicised corruption investigations, cheer-led by a oligopolistic media, an increasingly radicalised anti-PT right had fully wrested control of the streets. In May, they finally achieved their aim, removing the PT from power and re-installing Brazil’s traditional elites in the form of new President Michel Temer.

The rich had deluded themselves into believing that the impeachment was about corruption (it wasn’t) and that with the PT gone things would improve. Those I spoke to in my research in São Paulo’s peripheries didn’t buy it. Many wanted the PT out, but no-one thought Temer was the answer.

Over the next two years, as the corruption and incompetence of the restoration regime became impossible to ignore, rich and poor alike lost patience. As the economy continued to stagnate and security deteriorated, an eventual majority gravitated towards the view that a clean break was needed. That is where we are today.

2018: “Brazil acima de tudo, Deus acima de todos”

Make no mistake, the movement around Bolsonaro represents a revolt by the most retrograde, barbarous elements of an elite that wants to turn the clock back to the Brazil I first encountered in early 2003. They want to go back to a time when they didn’t have to pay their maids a minimum wage, when their children didn’t have to compete for university places and jobs with talented poor kids.

If they can’t achieve this counter-revolution within democratic restraints, it is quite possible they will be willing to turn the clock back even further – to a time before democratic elections risked producing the “wrong” results and a minimal consensus existed around constitutional protections for fundamental rights and core democratic institutions.

Bolsonaro’s campaign slogan “Brazil above all, God above everyone” leaves little doubt about his own attitudes towards diversity and political freedom. That so many should have embraced such a programme it is deeply concerning.

But Bolsonaro’s victory also contains within it the desire among many lower-income Brazilians for something better than they currently have. Many benefited from the years of PT government, escaping poverty, becoming consumers and, to a slightly greater degree than before, citizens. But they still work long hours and struggle to pay their bills; they rely on crumbling, under-staffed schools and hospitals; they walk the streets in fear. They want more than this, and rightly so.

I suspect things will get worse – maybe a lot worse –in Brazil before they get better. And this is a moment for action. The immediate priority is defending the most vulnerable groups in society – dark-skinned young men in urban peripheries, favela residents, landless peasants and indigenous groups, LGBT people – who will face a violent onslaught from a revanchist government and its most vicious supporters. Depending on how things unfold, defending the rights of these groups could eventually turn into a struggle to defend democracy itself and for the very existence of a political left.

But this is also a time for reflection – about what the PT didn’t achieve during its thirteen years in government and why not. About why so many who benefited from their policies eventually came to see them as part of the problem.

I believe there remains a deep desire among Brazil’s lower-income majority for greater equality and democracy, and that includes those who have just voted for Bolsonaro. We need to have an alternative project ready for when, sooner or later, they realise that he offers neither.

Suzi Weismann talks to Matthew Aaron Richmond in São Paulo about the Oct 28 second round of Brazil’s general election. The ultra-right-wing Jair Bolsonaro of the Social Liberal party is ahead of the PT’s Fernando Haddad (as Lula sits in jail), and we get Matthew’s analysis of how Bolsonaro was able to gain a formidable base among the poor — and why these constituencies support Bolsonaro when his economic policies will hurt them. (The interview starts at 21:15).

On the eve of Brazil’s election around one third of the electorate is saying it will vote for a man who celebrates military dictatorship, advocates state terror and has said he will not accept electoral defeat. This rises to over 40% in the 2nd round. What’s going on?

I believe that to understand Bolsonaro’s rise we need not only understand the much discussed radicalisation of virulent antipetismo among the middle and upper classes, but also his appeal among large parts of the lower-income and non-white populations – a phenomenon that remains little understood.

Based on several years of research in favelas and peripheries in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, I offer my interpretation of the roots of “Bolsonarismo popular” in a blog post for the Sociological Review

Assemblage thinking offers a new conceptual toolkit for analysing the relationship between society and space. However, major questions remain regarding both its ontological propositions and how it might be applied to the analysis of specific socio-spatial objects. This article contributes to these debates by using assemblage thinking to trace the long-term development of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. These territories have undergone a range of seemingly contradictory changes over recent decades. On one hand, expanded infrastructure and service provision and improved social outcomes have meant favelas have moved closer to, and in some cases surpassed, areas officially designated as “formal”. On the other, they continue to be heavily stigmatised, targeted by exceptional forms of governance, and subject to militarisation and abuse by police and non-state armed groups. Tracing these developments over time, I argue that the favela is best understood as an assemblage of heterogeneous, interacting elements that operate according to diverse logics. Despite continual pressures to deterritorialise, or break apart, a density of components and relations has ensured the continual reterritorialisation of the “favela” as a distinct object of perception and action over more than a century, with far reaching consequences for residents and the wider city.

Brazilian film Mate-Me Por Favor (Kill Me Please) centres on the lives of four rebellious teenage girls against the backdrop of a series of brutal murders in the wealthy suburb where they live. I argue that the neighbourhood of Barra da Tijuca in the west of Rio de Janeiro provides both the necessary socio-spatial conditions for the drama, as well as a rich symbolic canvas for exploring key themes like innocence, transgression and violence. Barra emerged in the 1970s as a ‘solution’ to Rio’s urban crisis, providing a large, unexploited space for the middle classes to insulate themselves from the growing disorder and violence of the inner city. Designed using rational modernist principles, it grew into a landscape of gated condominiums and shopping malls connected by car-strewn expressways. The area thus embodies a tension between innocence and desire that is shared by Mate-Me Por Favor’s four protagonists. In recent years, meanwhile, the hosting of the Olympic Games and other mega-events has brought a massive wave of speculative development to the area, producing new liminal spaces and intensified flows of people that have jeopardized residents’ sense of control. The film suggests that Barra’s alienated youth are determined to venture beyond the walls that were designed to protect them, thus exposing them to new, unknown threats.

I appeared on the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast Episode 9 – An Englishman’s Castle: Housing and protest, alongside presenters Alex Hochuli and George Hoare and fellow guest Sam Cowie. We discussed the Grenfell Tower fire, Housing inequalities in London and São Paulo, and looked back at Brazil’s 2013 protests.

In September 2008, the British financial system was on the verge of collapse. I’m talking actual collapse. Like, most of the major UK banks declaring bankruptcy, credit-starved businesses quickly following suit, supply chains fragmenting, money not coming out of ATMs. And who knows what else… Forced nationalisation of the entire banking system? Of food production? Mass rationing? Basically the kind of scenario we’ve only seen in the rich world during wartime and the Great Depression.

The financial crisis arrived in Britain from the US property market. There, credit had plugged a growing gap between stagnant wages and rising house prices. Banks made a fortune out of this through clever risk-pooling strategies, though in the end though these turned out to be incredibly stupid. “Sub-prime” mortgage holders began to default on their loans and no one could tell which pools were safe and which were toxic. With no one willing to provide credit, the entire system effectively suffered a seizure.

Although there were some structural similarities, the same crisis could not have originated in the UK. There was a similarly growing gap between incomes and rising living costs, but a residual social housing sector and government-provided tax credits housing benefit meant that low earners were neither tempted into unsustainable mortgages nor thrown out into the street. But the New Labour governments of Blair and Brown had allowed the British economy to become one of the most financialised in the rich world. This meant it was particularly vulnerable to contagion from the US crash.

Luckily the dystopian scenario of total collapse was averted by a huge government rescue package, which in the UK had to be disproportionately large. It is difficult to calculate the true cost of this intervention. It combined a mixture of loans and guarantees to banks, as well as a major fiscal stimulus to keep the economy churning. It certainly ran into the hundreds of billions of pounds. The public debt ballooned overnight.

We have been paying for this disastrous event ever since. But if you had just followed mainstream British politics over the intervening 9 years you would never know it. The structural crisis of hyper-financialised capitalism has been rarely mentioned in political debate. Instead a series of other issues have, one after the other, taken centre stage.

The immediate political fallout of the crisis was, quite frankly, ridiculous. In 2007 Conservative leader David Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne had matched Labour’s spending commitments. However, following the bailouts they began to talk about the debt and the structural deficit – that is, the gap between money going out and money coming in, which had automatically risen in response to increased unemployment and strain on services. They claimed the debt and deficit were the cause, rather than the result of the crisis.

THIS WAS A LIE.

Prior to the crash public spending as a proportion of GDP was around 40% – well within historic norms and much lower than several other countries that were less seriously affected by the crisis.

Around the time of the 2010 election, as the Eurozone began to tank, Osborne claimed that if the deficit wasn’t rapidly brought under control Britain was on the verge of becoming the next Greece.

THIS WAS A LIE.

The UK was not a part of the Eurozone and so its central bank could use various tools to stabilise its bond markets and prevent the debt from growing exponentially.

What Cameron and Osborne’s LIES were in fact doing was preparing public opinion for a radical austerity programme. As they entered coalition with a pliant Liberal Democrat Party after 2010, they promised to wipe out the deficit within five years, mainly through huge cuts to public spending. They knew the public would be resistant to such a plan, and so mobilised a series of arguments (spoiler alert: LIES) to make their case.

They promoted the idea that the public finances were like a household budget, and that if you “maxed out the credit card”, as the previous Labour government had supposedly done, you had to suffer until you had paid it off.

THIS WAS A LIE

A government is nothing like a household. Its job is not to limit spending to a specific amount at a given moment, but to spend in ways that will sustain positive forms of economic activity over the long term. That means spending on education, on healthcare, on infrastructure, and on social security, all of which have huge and enduring multiplier effects. This applies even – perhaps especially – when the economy in struggling and the private sector refuses to invest. Government debt, sustained by taxation, is invariably more trustworthy and serviceable than private sector debt. It is the economic generator of last resort.

Instead, the austerity of the coalition years sucked life out of the economy. It managed, erratically, to squeeze out some spurts of growth by pumping up asset bubbles with Quantitative Easing – Osborne’s own “magic money tree” – though only at the cost of aggravating a long-standing housing crisis. It also held down unemployment, but only by systematically attacking the working and living standards of the population. People were either pushed into shitty, casual jobs at places like Sports Direct or self-employment, or had their public-sector jobs steadily downgraded. Only Greece has seen a worse decline in real wages since 2007. No major advanced economy has seen such weak productivity growth.

Despite all of these attempts to cut its way to growth and deficit reduction, the Treasury’s growth projections consistently failed to materialise and the eradication of the deficit disappeared further and further into the future. Meanwhile, the cuts began to take a major toll on frontline services. Knowing that public opinion might turn against them, the Conservatives needed another line of attack, so they began to blame “scroungers”. These were the feckless poor who sat around all day enjoying a life of luxury at huge public expense, while honest “strivers” went out to work.

THIS WAS A LIE.

Unemployment benefit constituted a tiny amount of the national budget. In any case, most people receiving welfare support were employed, but simply in jobs that didn’t pay enough to live on. Or they were disabled. These people were systematically impoverished by the cuts, and publicly humiliated by new workfare schemes and, sometimes deadly, “work capability assessments”. From being practically non-existent in 2008, today there are over 2,000 food banks operating in the UK.

It may have failed economically, even on its own terms, but austerity was always more a political project than an economic one. In the long term it aimed to permanently shrink the British state. In the short term it sought to trap the opposition into accepting this logic. And in this sense, it worked. Against his better judgment, and despite challenging especially predatory sectors of the economy (energy and rail companies, zero-hour employers, landlords, the press), “soft Left” Labour leader Ed Miliband refused to contest the Conservatives’ central narrative about Labour’s overspending, and triangulated in response to their attacks on welfare recipients. He was fighting with one hand voluntarily tied behind his back.

In the absence of effective left-wing opposition to the coalition’s economic disaster, this instead came, in a roundabout way, from the right. Mid-parliament, the anti-EU and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party began to surge in the polls. Terrified of losing votes and MPs, Cameron was bullied into offering a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. He thus gambled the future of the country for the sake of internal party management. He also began to parrot UKIP’s anti-immigration rhetoric, reproducing tropes about immigrants stealing jobs and sucking up benefits.

THESE WERE LIES.

Immigrants have an overwhelmingly positive effect on the economy, doing crucial jobs and disproportionately contributing to the tax base. Nonetheless, the damage had been done.

Cameron got lucky on the 2014 Scottish referendum, and even luckier in the 2015 general election. But in 2016 his luck ran out. Many voters were looking around for someone to blame for austerity, and they had been conditioned by years of relentless media LIES about the EU and immigrants. The Leave campaign LIED through its teeth, but then again so did Remain. The whole thing became an ugly mud-slinging match, where no-one believed anything and everyone simply voted on emotion. In the end, a narrow majority of the electorate voted to leave the EU. The “modernisers”, Cameron and Osborne were out. And a new nativist Tory-UKIP hybrid, coalescing around Theresa May, was in.

During May’s year in power the lies have come thick and fast.

She claimed that Britain would quickly achieve improved trade deals with the EU and with other major economies.

THIS WAS A LIE.

The task will be fiendishly difficult and is probably beyond the capacity of the civil service and the government’s sorry looking “Brexit team”.

She claimed the “saboteurs” of parliament were blocking her Brexit plans.

LIE.

MPs voted through Article 50 with very little opposition, terrified of being accused of resisting the “will of the people”.

She said on multiple occasions that she wanted to provide stability and that the last thing the country needed was another election.

LIE.

In mid-April she called a snap election. She believed that with a 20+ point advantage in the polls she would win at a stroll. And at least that way she would secure a strong mandate for the inevitable failure to come.

I will not even go into the SUCCESSIVE LIES of her dreadful campaign.

All in all, the story of our political class since before 2008 is one of relentless and spectacular failures. And it is a story of deep dishonesty about the underlying causes of those failures. Let’s call this what it is: an economic system that does not work – that cannot work – for most people, and a political system that does all it can to prevent us from changing that.

And yet over the past two years, something has been growing in the darkness. Sick of austerity, and disgusted by the scapegoating of immigrants and the poor, a growing number of people have been demanding something different. Since 2015, the Labour Party membership has more than trebled, making it Europe’s largest social democratic party. And it has elected as its leader Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran backbencher who, almost alone, stuck to his principles during the long years of New Labour hegemony.

Corbyn is not perfect. There are points on which I disagree with him. At times over the past two years I have thought his leadership looked fundamentally incompetent. But I have no doubt that he is as sincere and principled as he seems. (He has been my local MP for my entire life, and I have honestly never heard a bad word said about him). And, as the Party’s manifesto shows, he has the beginnings – though only the beginnings – of what could be a genuinely transformative programme.

But here’s the most important thing: it’s not even about Corbyn. He is just a temporary place holder for something much deeper.

Really, it’s about us.

It’s about the (re)emergence of an active and informed public that will no longer put up with an economic system that clearly doesn’t work.

That will reject the unspoken rules of establishment politics and media, where lies go unchallenged.

That will resist the supposed inevitability of social inequality and deepening prejudice.

That will allow itself to believe that something better is possible.

I dearly hope I’m wrong, but I expect the Conservatives to win a comfortable majority tomorrow. I don’t think we’ve yet turned the corner on that front. But even so, it won’t feel like a defeat. This government has no answers to the real problems we face. And the last few weeks have shown that when it inevitably fails there will be an active, energised mass ready to hold them – and the Labour opposition, whoever is leading it – to account.

This campaign has made me believe, for maybe the first time, that genuine, radical political change during my lifetime is possible. I don’t know if and when this will bear fruit, but just that feeling of possibility is exhilarating.